Reflecting on his identity, the Portuguese poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro once said, ‘I am neither I nor the other one I am something in between.’ Sá-Carneiro's statement speaks to the very nature of identity. Identity is ambiguous, fluid, and yet markedly present in everyday encounters and negotiations. As such, identifications are not static nor do they exist a priori; rather, they are dependent upon socio-historical experiences. A person's identity is robustly plural, yet there has been an academic penchant to reduce people's identities into singular affiliations, to root them in a fixed position and not in Sá-Carneiro's in-between.
This book avoids the mistake of fixed identities and decisively locates itself within the murky and contradictory tendencies of personhood. Irving Johnson provides a detailed account of the religious, social, and political identifications of people who inhabit a Malaysian village with the pseudonym of Ban Bor On. While the book pays heed to roads, landmarks, and material culture, the book's focus is on the people, not the village, and this allows for the tracking of subjects and subjectivities between villages and across the borders of Malaysia to Thailand.
One of this book's most valuable contributions is its thick description of Thainess (khwam pen thai). Most academic works that discuss Thainess relegate its significance to the orbit of the nation–state, which offers an incomplete picture. Johnson notes in the preface the transnational and ethnic dimensions to Thainess, ‘It revolved around the question of what it means to be Thai living in an Islamic state in today's Malaysia. This constant attempt to essentialise what was blurry and indeterminate drew me into the ethnographic project’ (pp. xvi, xvii).
Kelantan was once under Siamese suzerainty as a mueang (vassal polity) in the eighteenth century, but became a British Residency in 1903 and later part of Malaysia. In addition to its rich Buddhist heritage, since the nineteenth century Kelantan has been known as the centre for Islamic learning in Southeast Asia, earning it the title of Mecca's verandah. What makes for an unusually coterminous religious space was the construction of a fifty-foot high Walking Buddha in a Ban Bor On monastery in 1996. Unlike attacks such as the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, the Walking Buddha on Mecca's verandah did not provoke any conflicts.
The book shows how a mixture of cosmopolitanism and marginality creates a fertile ground for local agency and new forms of identification. Kelantanese Thai Buddhists have a distinctive language that incorporates both Thai and Malay words; they smuggle in Thai rice from across the border, watch Thai television, and are fiercely patriotic of their Malaysian heritage.
The chapters are thematically divided and provide the larger brush strokes to the book's treatment of the region, its inhabitants, and Thainess. In the first chapter, Johnson examines the centralising force of roads and the ways in which they both connect Ban Bor On to the rest of Malaysia and also provide the means for Ban Bor On's inhabitants to travel beyond the village and the country. Buddhist monks perform their morning alms along these roads and villagers take to the roads in their celebratory Buddhist ordination processions. In addition to serving as a medium for travel, Ban Bor On's roads are also sites of material culture. The rest pavilions (sala) along the main road denote what Johnson calls ‘roadside Thainess’, and announce to visitors the cultural borders of the Thai village (p. 40).
Throughout the chapters Johnson artfully stitches together a comprehensive account of regional history with powerful ethnographic accounts to illuminate the ways in which Kelantanese Thai Buddhist personhood is understood and performed. In chapter 2, Johnson discusses the ambiguity of Kelantanese Thainess when juxtaposed between Malaysia and Thailand. This tension is epitomised in a local debate over the way to indicate Thainess and not Thai nationalism for a soccer team's mascot.
Johnson further problematises the notion of Thainess with the discussion of Sinicisation in chapter 3. Similar to the rise of Sino–Thai financial and cultural power in Thailand, there has been a dramatic increase of Chinese and Daoist influences in Ban Bor On that is predicated on affluent Chinese donations and patronage. Ironically, it is the introduction of the Daoist elements that provide more problems to the Ban Bor On villagers than issues of ethnic, cultural or political markers.
In chapter 4, attention is paid to the development of Thai Buddhist monasticism in Kelantan and its patronage by two institutions: the Kelantanese government through the Sultan of Kelantan and the Department of Religious Affairs in Thailand. While Kelantanese Thais venerate both the Sultan and the Thai monarchy, they view their respect of the Thai monarchy strictly as an ethnic marker, not as political deference (p. 144). It is in this chapter that Johnson briefly discusses the challenges to cosmopolitanism and Kelantanese Thai Buddhist youths' feeling of increased marginalisation (p. 139).
Chapter 5 addresses recent changes in the Buddhist landscape of Ban Bor On, particularly the growth of the Dhammakaya sect. In this section, Johnson touches upon the recent violence in southern Thailand and the ways in which the violence (and the perception of violence) has impacted Kelantanese Thai Buddhists' mobility across the Malaysia–Thai border.
The Buddha on Mecca's verandah provides the reader with an intimate portrayal of a Southeast Asian hinterland. As such, this ethnography is a critical read for scholars of cultural anthropology, Southeast Asia, Buddhism, and Islam. It adds an important nuance to the Southeast Asian cultural and political systems of Stanley Tambiah's galactic polities and O.W. Wolter's mandalas and allows for a comparative framework between Thai diasporas such as the Thai Buddhists of China's Sipsongpanna. While this work does not discuss the current violence in southern Thailand, it offers a rich description of the Malaysian side of the border and is an example of the pluralism and cosmopolitanism once endemic to the southernmost provinces of Thailand.
